Charleston Society for the Preservation of Spirituals

Topic: Early Versions - Performers
The Charleston Society for the Preservation of Spirituals did not indicate where it collected its version of "Come by Here." For most of the other songs, it provided the name of an island, river, town, parish, or plantation. They were spread from the Santee River north of Charleston to Beaufort.

To know something about the performers then requires learning more about the Gullah-speaking slaves in coastal South Carolina than appeared in earlier posts. [1]

Lorenzo Dow Turner documented the presence of some 4,000 African words in Gullah in the early 1930s. His primary South Carolina sources were individuals living on Edisto Island, Saint Helena Island near Beaufort, and Johns and Wadmalaw islands near Charleston. He also talked to people from two other locations mentioned by the Charleston Society, Bluffton and James Island. [2]

P. E. H. Hair found 30% of the general terms Turner collected were used by the Yorùbá of modern Nigeria; 25% were from Sierra Leone, home of the Mende, and 20% were Kongo. More important, 65% of the words retained in ritual and narrative materials, like stories, songs, and prayers, were Mende. The Vai of neighboring, modern Liberia contributed 21%. [3]

This mirrors Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s analysis of shipping manifests in The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database. [4] From 1801 to 1807, most of the captives who arrived in Charleston were from Kongo, Sierra Leone, and the Gold Coast of modern Ghana. Between 1750 and 1775, when 43% of South Carolina and Georgia’s total slave population was imported, [5] the largest number came from modern Sénégal-Gambia and Sierra Leone. The Gold Coast and Kongo were a distant third and fourth. [6]

These groups came from different parts of the continent, and had cultures that began developing at different times. The earliest evidence for humanoid evolution has been found in Ethiopia by archaeologists. Lucy’s remains were discovered in 1974 by Donald Johansen in the Afar section of the Great Rift Valley. [7]

Geneticists attempted to define what happened next by looking at genomes that could be distinguished by particular clusters of mutations called haplogroups. Those based on variations associated with the paternal Y chromosome located the center of diversity in Cameroon, the silver star on the map below. [8]

Scientists assigned letters in chronological order, so that the A group was the earliest. The current location of individuals carrying that genome was only a relic of the past. New groups tended to displace earlier ones that then survived in remote areas. The large A area along the southeastern Atlantic coast coincided with the Kalahari Desert.

After the migration out of Africa during the Ice Age that led to the development of the C and D groups, the next major mutation emerged with the E group in Ethiopia. It eventually filled the continent.

Linguists’ attempts at reconstructing the development of African languages created a more nuanced interpretation of the movement of the E group. As shown in the map below, the A haplogroup appeared as the light-yellow population of Khoi-San speakers.

The primary language family of group E in sub-Saharan African was the Niger-Congo that spanned the area below the Sénégal river east along the Niger to the drainage of the Congo. [9] Kay Williamson argued that, "on the basis of the principle of least moves," the original homeland was the confluence on the Benue and Niger rivers at Lokoja in central Nigeria. From there its speakers spread west, east, and south subdividing as they migrated. [10]

As succeeding groups moved west they either absorbed the earlier populations or forced them to relocate. Thus, three major Niger-Congo subfamilies appear in the map for western Africa.

To the west of the Volta subgroups, the rose-colored Mandé was a separate, coherent clade.

Gerrit Dimmendaal and Anne Storch suggested "The internal diversification within Greenberg’s West Atlantic (or Atlantic in current terminology) indeed was so huge that some scholars would argue that it is primarily an areal grouping representing a number of independent, early descendants of Niger-Congo." [11]

David Sapir found enough commonalities within the Atlantic group to propose two sub-groups an early Southern Mel, and a later Northern Mel. [12] Gola was part of the earlier group that was expanding "about 2500 years ago" in what is now Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. [13]

The migration south by the Bantu (tan on the map) came after the moves west. One characteristic of linguistic and genetic evolution was greater diversity in earlier areas than later zones, simply because not enough time had passed for variation to develop in the younger regions.

Graphics
1. U. S. Geological Survey, National Atlas. "Average Rainfall for South Carolina." Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Thegreatdr on 18 March 2008. The dark area near the coast where tidal rice was grown is the darker green.

Total of spirituals collected along the Santee River includes Santee River.

Charleston includes Back River, Charleston, Cooper River, Grayton Hall, Goose Creek, James Island, Red Top.

Edisto Island includes Christ Church Parish, Edisto Island, and Saint Andrews Parish.

Beaufort includes Ashepoo River Plantation, Beaufort, Bluffton, and Tomotley Plantation.

Berkeley County includes Pinopolis and Upper St Johns Parish.

Hampton County includes McPhersonville and Pocotaligo.

No location mentioned: 6
Two locations mentioned: 6

2. Section of Irish. "World Map of Y-Chromosome Haplogroups - Dominant Haplogroups in Pre-Colonial Populations with Possible Migrations Routes." Wikimedia Commons. 6 July 2018.

3. Ulamm. "Niger-Congo Languages." Wikimedia Commons. 28 October 2007.

End Notes
1. The Charleston Society and the development of rice plantations in South Carolina were discussed in a series posted between 6 January 2019 and 20 January 2019. Gullah was described in the post for 6 January 2019.

2. Lorenzo Dow Turner. Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2002 edition. Gullah vocabulary, chapter 3; list of informants, 291-292. He also collected from people living along the Georgia coast and on its islands.

3. P. E. H. Hair. "Sierra Leone Items in the Gullah Dialect of American English." Sierra Leone Language Review 4:79-84:1965.

4. David Eltis, David Richardson, Stephen D. Behrendt, and Herbert S. Klein. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

5. David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson. "Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas." The American Historical Review 112 (2007): 1329–1358, table 1. The other 57% was spread over one hundred thirty years.

6. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall. "Figure 4.1. Atlantic Slave Trade Voyages to South Carolina (1701-1807)." 94 in Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

7. Wikipedia. "Lucy (Australopithecus)."
8. Wikipedia. "Haplogroup."

9. John T. Bendor-Samuel. "Niger-Congo languages." Encyclopædia Britannica website. 26 July 1999; last updated 21 November 2017.

10. Kay Williamson’s work evolved in a number of papers including "Towards reconstructing Proto-Niger-Congo." 49-70 in Proceedings of the 2nd World Congress of African Linguistics, Leipzig 1997. Edited by H. E. Wolff and O. Gensler. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2000.

11. Gerrit J. Dimmendaal and Anne Storch. "Niger-Congo: A Brief State of the Art." Oxford Handbooks Online. February 2016. Joseph H. Greenberg created the first accepted taxonomy in The Languages of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1963.

12. J. D. Sapir. "West Atlantic: An Inventory of the Languages, Their Noun Class Systems and Consonant Alteration." Current Trends in Linguistics 7:45-112:1971. Discussed by B. W. Andah. "The Peoples of Upper Guinea (between the Ivory Coast and the Casamance)." 530-558 in Africa from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century. Edited by M. El Fasi. Paris: UNESCO, 1988. 539.

13. Andah. 552.

Charleston’s Under Side

Topic: Early Versions - Collectors
The authority of plantation owners in antebellum South Carolina was ensconced in law, but memories of the Stono Rebellion, [1] Revolutionary War desertions, [2] and daily acts of passive resistance or malicious obedience made many aware of the fragility of their positions.

The Denmark Vesey incident fed their worst fears. Free Blacks, who were members of an independent African Methodist Episcopal Church, were rumored to be planning a revolt. [3] Suspects were arrested, tortured, and hung in 1822. [4]

After the executions, the master of the slave workhouse asked the state Assembly to be reimbursed for "for the cost of incarcerating each of the arrested men." [5] He was Aeneas Reeves, great-grandfather of Harold Stone Reeves. [6] I don’t know if he was actively involved in the tortures [7] that occurred there, or if his position was a sinecure that involved little more than financial oversight.

Aeneas’ father had served in the Continental Army and moved to Charleston after the war to marry a local widow. [8] He was a silversmith from Philadelphia, [9] whose ancestors had moved from Boston [10] to Long Island [11] to Cumberland County, New Jersey. [12] Aeneas married the daughter of an actor, [13] and sent his son to Europe to study organ. [14]

The Charleston mayor, [15] who exploited Vesey to further his own political ambitions, was also the son of a Revolutionary War soldier who came south. Only James Hamilton’s [16] father married the daughter of the wealthy planter who had pioneered rice cultivation on the Santee River. [17] When he married the widowed Elizabeth Lynch, her lands were worth $250,000. Under his management their value fell to $6,000. [18]

Young Hamilton was forced to sign away his inheritance when he turned 21 in 1807. [19] Like his father, he enlisted in the War of 1812 [20] and married a rich heiress in 1813. [21] However, Elizabeth Heyward’s father had married the daughter of a Huguenot tailor. [22] After he died, Thomas Heyward did everything he could to prevent his son’s wife and daughter from inheriting plantations near Beaufort. [23]

Elizabeth’s stepfather, [24] who wanted to exploit her property himself, [25] demanded Hamilton sign a prenuptial agreement to place Callawassie Island in trust. William Behan said Hamilton refused. [26] The year he was elected to the state House of Representatives, [27] Hamilton sold her land and slaves and put the money in a postnuptial trust in 1819. [28]

In 1824, while running for a seat in the U. S. House, Hamilton bought two plantations and their slaves from her stepfather, who had been ruined by the Panic of 1819 [29]. In contravention to the postnuptial agreement, he placed them in his name rather than that of the trust so he could mortgage them. [30]

One term into Andrew Jackson’s administration, he left Washington to become South Carolina governor, just as the tariffs of 1826 and 1832 were an issue. Hamilton called the Nullification Convention of 1832 that formally refused to obey the law. [31]

Hamilton was not raised on a plantation, but in Newport, Rhode Island, [32] where the economy was fueled by slave ships. [33] During the six years he was in Congress, he lived in boardinghouses [34] where he heard how Northerners made, or claimed to make, their money. His plantations were run by overseers. [35]

He left the governorship in 1832 and turned to business, first with the Bank of Charleston [36] and then as a cotton broker. [37] By 1836, Behan said, he had title to sixteen plantations in four states, all mortgaged. [38] Hamilton also was buying land script in Texas for the South Carolina Land Company. [39]

The Panic of 1837 destroyed his Texas plans and left him financially vulnerable. In 1842 Hamilton owed over $700,000. [40] His wife, with his consent, sued him for violating the terms of the 1819 trust. [41] Aggravating matters, Sam Houston took over the government of Texas in 1842, and cancelled any and all financial agreements the republic had made with Hamilton. [42]

In 1843 Hamilton and his wife escaped to a cotton plantation in Alabama. The 6,000-acres were actually a business partnership that owned the 300 slaves. [43] During the drought of 1845, he took some of those slaves to his Texas plantation, which was a partnership with Abner Jackson. [44]

The first attempts at processing sugar failed. [45] Hamilton sold more land, [46] and moved 130 slaves to Retrieve near the Gulf coast beyond reach of his creditors in the States. Six banks had liens on them. [47]

His financial condition worsened, and some of his partners were forced to sell their shares in his Texas plantation in 1855. [48] He still was trying to recover when he died in a ship wreck on his way to Galveston in November during the Panic of 1857 that had begun in August. [49]

The slaves remained in Teas where they were managed by Jackson. [50] His stepson was Abner Stroebel. He remembered he could recognize Hamilton’s "slaves by their politeness and courtly manners." [51] Each move by Hamilton, from Beaufort to Alabama to Texas, had moved Gullah culture farther west.

End Notes
1. The Stono Rebellion was mentioned in the post for 18 September 2018.
2. The desertions were discussed in the post for 16 January 2019.

3. Sterling Stuckey and Margaret Washington Creel analyzed the religious and cultural backgrounds of Vesey and his followers.

Stuckey. Slave Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 edition. 47-58.

Washington. "A Peculiar People." New York: New York University Press, 1988. 150-158.

4. Wikipedia. "Denmark Vesey."

5. Michael P. Johnson. "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," The William and Mary Quarterly 58:915-976:2001. Online copy had no page numbers.

6. The work house was better known as the Sugar House. Damon L. Fordham described the tortures in "The Sugar House – A Slave Torture Chamber in Charleston." The Charleston [South Carolina] Chronicle web page. 29 November 2017.

7. Reeves membership in the Charleston Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was discussed in the post for 6 January 2019. He was the son of John Bounetheau Reeves, who was a Charleston banker before and after the Civil War. [52] John’s sister, Charlotte Sophia Reeves, [53] married a German businessman, Charles Otto Witte. [54] Their daughter Beatrice married into the Ravenel family and became a writer. She also was discussed in the post for 6 January 2019.

8. Introduction, probably by Dick Reeves’ father, John B. Reeves. Extracts from the Letter-Books of Lieutenant Enos Reeves, Pennsylvania Line. Philadelphia: 1989. Originally published by Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography in 1896 and 1891.

9. Carl Mark Williams. Silversmiths of New Jersey, 1700-1825. Philadelphia: G. S. MacManus Co., 1949. Extract posted on "Enos Reeves" by Jonathan Reeves. The Reeves Project website. 15 August 2018.

10. Debra Nelson Pomykal (Darrough). "Thomas Reeves." Geni website. 23 May 2018. He was the immigrant ancestor.

11. Caryn Beth Burroughs. "John Reeves." Geni website. 7 July 2017. He was Thomas’ son and Enos’ great-great-grandfather.

12. "Abraham Reeves." Geni website. 23 March 2016. He was Enos’ grandfather.

13. Aeneas Reeves married Elizabeth Sully, daughter of Matthew Sully and Elizabeth Robertson. [55] Matthew was the son of Matthew Sully and Sarah Chester. The elder Matthew was an English actor who took his family to Charleston in 1792, where the younger also appeared on the stage. Thomas Sully and Lawrence Sully were his brothers, and Elizabeth’s uncles. Both were painters. [56]

14. Obituary for Aeneas Reeves. [Charleston, South Carolina] News and Courier. 11 August 1863. Posted by Saratoga. "Matthew Sully Reeves." Find a Grave website. 18 August 2008.

15. Technically, Charleston did not have a mayor. The function was filled by an intendant.

16. This wasn’t the Hamilton mentioned in the post for 18 September 2018. James Hamilton was a common Scots name and the one discussed earlier moved from Scotland to Philadelphia to Saint Simons Island, Georgia. The mayor’s grandfather, William Hamilton, had migrated as a young adolescent from Belfast to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, by 1733. [57]

17. James Hamilton’s father, also James Hamilton, married the daughter of Thomas Lynch.

18. Robert Tinkler. James Hamilton of South Carolina. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2004. 25.

19. Tinkler. 26. Hamilton’s father’s financial problems partly were caused by signing notes for his wife’s step-father. [58] His wife’s widowed mother, Hannah Motte, had married William Moultrie, another Revolutionary War soldier [59] with no ability to run a plantation. The impoverishment of Hannah may be one reason her sister-in-law, Rebecca Brewton Motte, had ensured his daughter’s plantation could only be inherited through the female line. How this affected Josephine Pinckney was discussed in the post for 6 January 2019.

20. Tinkler. 30.
21. Tinkler. 31.

22. Thomas Heyward’s son Daniel married Ann Sarah Trezevant. [60] He was the stepbrother of the Nathaniel Heyward who was discussed in the post for 16 January 2019.

23. Tinkler. 31.

24. The conflict with Heyward began when the widowed Trezevant married Nicholas Cruger, Jr. [61]

25. William A Behan. Short History of Callawassie Island, South Carolina. New York: iUniverse, 2004. 39.

26. Behan. 40.
27. Tinkler. 34.
28. Behan. 41.
29. Tinkler. 58.
30. Behan. 42.
31. Wikipedia. "James Hamilton Jr."

32. Tinkler. 21, 24-5. Newport was one of the places absentee planters went to escape the diseased-filled summers of the South Carolina coast. His mother also wintered there and sent him to a Northern boarding school.

33. Tinkler. 21-22.
34. Tinkler. 52-53.
35. Tinkler. 89.
36. Tinkler. 150-2.
37. Tinkler. 153.
38. Behan. 42.
39. Tinkler. 176.
40. Behan. 40.
41. Tinkler. 212-213.
42. Charles W. Brown. "Hamilton, James." Handbook of Texas Online. 15 June 2010.
43. Tinkler. 214.
44. Tinkler. 217.
45. Tinkler. 218.
46. Tinkler. 231.
47. Tinkler. 231-232.
48. Tinkler. 249.
49. Tinkler. 262-264.
50. Tinkler. 249.

51. Abner J. Strobel. The Old Plantations and Their Owners of Brazoria County, Texas. Houston: The Union National Bank, 1926. Reprinted in A History of Brazoria County. Edited by T. L. Smith, Junior. 1958. 46.

52. Harold Stone Reeves. Interviewed by Joan Ball for the South Carolina Historical Society, 24 March 1971.

53. Saratoga. "Charlotte Sophia Reeves Witte." Find a Grave website. 29 September 2009.

54. James Calvin Hemphill. "Charles Otto Witte." 1:436-440 in Men of Mark in South Carolina. Washington, DC: Men of Mark Publishing Company, 1907.

55. Saratoga, Matthew Sully Reeves.

56. Philip H. Highfill, Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans. "Sully, Matthew." 14:338-339 in Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1600-1800. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.

57. Harriet E. Wallace. Some Hamiltons and Wallaces of Lancaster Co., PA, Jefferson Co., OH, and South Carolina. Urbana: H. E. Wallace, 1986.

58. Tinkler. 25.
59. Tinkler. 17.
60. Tinkler. 30.
61. Tinkler. 31.

South Carolina - Irrigated Rice

Topic: Early Versions - Collectors
The American Revolution slowed the slave trade. English ships could not supply planters, and Michael Gomez suggested the traders were forced into the Bight of Biafra were the Guinea current was more treacherous. [1] David Eltis’ team reported a total 14,174 captives imported between 1776 and 1800, compared to 61,476 during the previous twenty-five years. [2]

The British, who occupied Charleston in 1780, encouraged bondsmen to defect to them. Some were sent to Nova Scotia where Moja Makani was revitalizing African-American traditions in 2015. [3] Others were conscripted into the Caribbean military unit mentioned in the post for 29 April 2018. Philip Morgan estimated a quarter of the slaves disappeared from Georgia and South Carolina. [4]

When Southerners began rebuilding after the Revolution they used different methods to grow rice. The swamp lands had developed freshets that destroyed crops. DuBose Heyward’s great-grandfather attributed the change to clearing the land. He remembered twenty years before the American Revolution:

"The upper country being then but partially cleared and cultivated, the greater part of its surface was covered with leaves, the limbs and trunks of decaying trees, and various other impediments to the quick discharge of the rains which fall upon it, into the creeks and ravines leading into the river; consequently much of the water was absorbed by the earth or evaporated before it could be received into its channels, and even when there so many obstacles yet awaited its progress, that heavy contributions were still levied upon it. The river, too, had time to extend along its course the first influx of water before that from more remote tributary sources would reach it. Owing to these and other causes, the Santee was comparatively exempt from those freshets which have since blighted the prosperity of what was once a second Egypt." [5]

Near Beaufort, Nathaniel Heyward realized, in 1787, his swamp land was "too far inland to adequately drain away the excess" water. [6] He was the younger son of Daniel Heyward by his second wife, [7] and thus had inherited less desirable plantation land. Since his older brothers weren’t interested in managing their estates, he volunteered. His experiments on their land with using the tides for irrigation produced a bigger rice crop with less labor. [8]

William Dusinberre said Heyward’s primary contribution was determining when and how to let water flood the land. Others figured out how to build the embankments and canals, borrowing from the Dutch. Still others improved the sluice gates, sometimes adapting African techniques, and introduced European pumps. [9] Jonathan Lucas built the first workable rice mill for a Santee river plantation in 1787. [10]

The adoption of flood irrigation narrowed the amount of available land to a thirty mile strip along the coast, and limited the planters to those with capital to invest in irrigation ditches and machinery. Josephine Pinckney’s great-great-grandmother, Rebecca Motte, sold her inland plantations to buy land in 1784 on the Santee River suitable for flood irrigation. [11]

The change favored those men like Nathaniel Heyward and Motte’s son-in-law, Thomas Pinckney, who were willing to apprentice themselves to their plantations. Men, like Pierce Butler, mentioned in the post for 4 October 2018, became dependent on the skills of their overseers.

The post for 13 January 2019 suggested white overseers had become more important before the Revolution, especially in areas with deaths caused by mosquito-born diseases. William Scarborough analyzed the backgrounds of men working on rice, tobacco, sugar, and cotton plantations. He found 92% of the overseers on rice plantations were born in South Carolina. The remaining 8% came from North Carolina or Ireland. [12]

Scarborough found those working on rice lands were "superior in ability and character" to overseers elsewhere. They were more likely to be educated, to be married, and to have accumulated some property, including their own slaves. Fourteen of the 23 he studied were the sons of farmers. [13]

He didn’t comment on nationality or religion, probably because such information did not exist in the historical records he was using. We know from other sources many Scots-Irish migrated to South Carolina, [14] but so had Huguenots and Englishmen. Irish immigrants could have meant Irish, Scots Irish, or Huguenot Irish. Scots-Irish Presbyterians were the ones who stressed education and literacy.

Tidal irrigation didn’t just require plantation owners learn new skills; it changed the nature of the labor force. While people who understood how to cultivate and harvest rice still were needed, men able to maintain the irrigation systems also were required. They did not have to come from the Southern Rivers area. Eltis noted the percentage of slaves imported from Senegambia after 1800 dropped to 31.6%. [15]

One reason for the differing origins was the slave trade was only legal in South Carolina between 1804 and 1808. [16] In the idealism following the Revolution, the state assembly had banned the trade, and plantation owners brought slaves raised or imported by other states.

When a national ban on the Atlantic trade was set to take effect, the legislature opened the trade for a few years. Dusinberre said this led to a short period of very high demand. He noted, "during these years Heyward bought scores, perhaps hundreds of Africans at lower prices than would have prevailed had his supply been confined to slaves imported from Virginia." [17]

More slaves came from the Guinea coast and Angola. They not only were the ones then available to smugglers, but, as mentioned in the post for 13 January 2019, some had an inherited ability to build up immunities to ague, as malaria then was called.

End Notes
1. Michael A. Gomez. Exchanging Our Country Marks. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 30.

2. David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson. "Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas." The American Historical Review 112:1329-1358:Dec 2007. Calculated from figures in Table 1.

3. Moja Makani was discussed in the post for 10 November 2017.

4. Philip D. Morgan."Black Society in the Lowcountry, 1760-1810." 83-141 in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution. Edited by Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983. Cited by Morgan. Slave Counterpoint. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 66.

5. Samuel Dubose. "Reminiscences of St. Stephen’s Parish, Craven County, and Notices of Her Old Homesteads." 35-85 in A Contribution to the History of the Huguenots of South Carolina. Edited by T. Gaillard Thomas. New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1887. 37-38. The map with the post for 10 January 2019 shows the location of these places. The Santee River was the one that flowed through the long, narrow reservoir of Lake Marion to Charleston. Lakes Marion and Moultrie flooded the Huguenot lands when the Santee was dammed in the 1940s to generate electric power.

6. William Dusinberre. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. 32.

7. DuBose Heyward descended from Daniel Heyward’s first wife. His membership in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019.

8. Dusinberre. 32.
9. Dusinberre. 32.

10. James Jonathan Lucas. Letter dated 20 April 1904. Reprinted by The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, volume 32, 1904.

11. "Eldorado Plantation – McClellanville – Charleston County." South Carolina Plantations website. Her will stipulated the plantation pass through the female line. Josephine Pinckney’s membership in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019.

12. William Kauffman Scarborough. The Overseer: Plantation Management in the Old South. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1984 edition. 57.

13. Scarborough. 56.

14. James G. Leyburn recorded Scots-Irish farmers began settling in upland South Carolina after George II purchased the rights of the proprietors in 1729 [page 219]. Others went to Charleston in response to a 1763 bounty [page 252]. Many who entered the port were indentured servants. The American Revolution stopped immigration. (The Scotch-Irish. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1962.)

15. Eltis. Table 1.
16. Dusinberre. 33.
17. Dusinberre. 33.

South Carolina - Swamp Rice

Topic: Early Versions - Collectors
Judith Carney argued in Black Rice that slaves were responsible for the successful introduction of rice as a commercial crop in South Carolina. She believed they imported the agrarian complex of ideas, methods, and technology from western Africa. [1] One example was the tall wooden mortar and pestle that resembled a butter churn. [2] She thought it was the innovation in rice threshing alluded to by Edward Randolph in the post for 10 January 2019.

Even with crop production problems solved, marketing imbalances like the one Alexander Salley noted in 1700 plagued the rice trade. [3] The demand for slaves led to more rebellions along the Sénégal and Gambia rivers. Muslims established a theocratic state on the Futa Jallon between the Gambia and Sierra Leone rivers in 1725 that decreed no Muslim could be sold. [4] José Lopez de Moura led a different group that destroyed the slave-trade center on Bunce Island in 1728. [5]

Bourbacar Barry showed the Futa Jallon leaders established a society that depended on non-Muslim slaves kept in special villages where they grew rice to feed the community and for export. The theocrats organized man hunts to supply slaves to trade for the guns they needed to continue the hunts. The warfare led to famines like that observed by Louis Moreau de Chambonneau in 1676.[6] Each famine led to more demand for rice from other suppliers.

Starting in the 1720s, South Carolinas expanded production from the coastal regions into the inland swamps around Charleston. Daniel Heyward introduced rice to Beaufort in 1741 and planters spread along the rivers there. [7] Each territorial expansion generated a demand for slaves to work the new plantations to grow the rice needed for the middle passage to bring new slaves.

At this point, David Eltis and his colleagues claimed that, despite Carney’s arguments, slaves didn’t just come from rice growing areas. Shipping manifests suggested only 21.9% of the slaves arriving in South Carolina and Georgia before 1750 came from the combined ports along the west African coast from the Sénégal to modern-day Liberia. [8]

Their statistics matched the experience of the leading slave trader in the early 1750s. Henry Laurens said "Gambia slaves were the favorites. Gold Coast negroes were highly valued" [9] in Charleston and "Angola slaves brought very good prices" [10] in 1755.

The diversity in demands probably came from the variety in crops. Josephine Pinckney’s great-grandmother, Eliza Lucas, had proven indigo could be processed in South Carolina in 1744. Five years later, Charleston’s agent in London persuaded Parliament to subsidize the crop. [11]

DuBose Heyward’s great-grandfather remembered after the bounty was offered, "one after another" of the Huguenot "planters moved" to Saint Stephen’s Parish "as opportunity offered for the purchase of land" and slaves. [12]

Rice grown inland was irrigated by water impounded in stagnant pools that bred disease carrying mosquitoes. In the twenty-five years before the American Revolution, Walter Edgar found "deserving poor" in Charleston changed from the "elderly and infirm" to "women and small children." One assumes many of their menfolk had died from yellow fever or complications of malaria. [13]

DuBose noted "residents along the swamp suffered severely from agues and fever," the common term for malaria. He said they also "observed with surprise, and it still remains a mystery, that overseers and negroes and others who lived entirely in the swamp enjoyed more health than those who lived on the uplands." [14]

Microbiologists since have found individuals were born with their mothers’ immunities against malaria, then lost them in the first months after birth when infant mortality was high. Resistence took years to redevelop through childhood and adolescence. Thereafter, people who were infected by bites didn’t feel the effects. [15]

White men who lived in wetlands, if they survived, were more likely to have acquired immunities than those who did not. Stuart Edelstein noted some African populations had developed genetic mutations that helped protect the young during the period when natural immunities were weak. Three forms of sickle cells appeared in Africa, one in Sénégal, one in Benin, and one in the Congo. [16]

The slave trade changed in the years between 1751 to 1775, when the percentage of slaves from Senegambia increased to 58.2%. More important, the absolute number of slaves increased dramatically. Eltis showed 4,856 slaves from the western African region before 1750 and 35,774 between then and the American Revolution.

The difficulty with reconciling presentations by Eltis and Carney was his periods were broad and didn’t coincide with critical historic events. The early period would have included the time before 1700 when rice was not a commercial crop. It also merged the years mentioned in the post for 10 January 2019 when the Royal African Company had a monopoly and the years after William took the throne of England in 1688. [17]

Several events in the late 1740s contributed to the changes. Barry said an extended drought along the Sénégal began in 1747 that intensified the war and famine cycle. [18] Perhaps to take advantage of the surplus of slaves, a Scots syndicate bought Bunce Island. [19]

Laurens was sent to England where he apprenticed with Richard Oswald. [20] When the Huguenot returned to Charleston in 1747, he used his inheritance to buy a partnership with a local trader, George Austin. [21] Joseph Opala wrote:

"Oswald’s agents at Bance island dispatched several ships a year to Charlestown, each containing between 250 and 350 slaves and goods such as ivory and camwood (a red dyewood). Laurens advertised the slaves, then sold them at auction to local rice planters for a ten percent commission. He used the substantial earnings from the sale to buy locally produced Carolina rice which he sent to Oswald in London, together with the ivory and camwood, and often in the same ship that brought the slaves from Africa." [22]

Demand for slaves increased again in 1751 when trustees for the colony of Georgia agreed to allow slavery. [23] Rice planters from South Carolina opened new lands below the Savannah River. Betty Wood said, "in the mid-1760s, Georgia began to import slaves directly from Africa—mainly from Angola, Sierra Leone, and the Gambia." [24]

During the Seven Years War fought between 1756 and 1763, the English gained control of the French slave trade at Saint-Louis on the Sénégal and Gorée on the Gambia, and acquired three more Caribbean islands, Dominica, Tobago, and Saint Vincent. [25] Barry suggested the new commander at Saint-Louis employed methods used by the British during what was also called the French and Indian War: Charles O’Hara "supplied arms to Moors, who reduced the entire Senegal valley to a killing field." [26]

Slave owners with the most capital could be more particular about the slaves they purchased, and those growing rice may, indeed, have chosen those offered by Laurens, especially if they were dependent on him for credit. Smaller buyers, including those growing rice or indigo on smaller inland holdings, may have been the ones who purchased the majority of the other slaves. As the map at the bottom shows, these parts of Africa, by chance, were the very areas with the greatest incidence of the sickle cell.

Graphics
Muntuwandi. "Distribution of the sickle cell trait, shown in pink and purple." Wikimedia Commons. 10 May 2007.

End Notes
1. Judith A. Carney. Black Rice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

2. Lydia Parrish showed the similarities in husking techniques in photographs of women "Pounding Corn in West Africa" and "Beating Rice in Darien," Georgia. Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. New York: Creative Age Press, 1942. Reprint edition, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. Between 48 and 49.

3. For more on Salley, see the post for 10 January 2019.

4. Boubacar Barry. La Sénégambie du xv^e au xux^e siècle. Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1988. Translated by Ayi Kwei Armah as Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Section on "Muslim revolutions in the eighteenth century."

5. A. Boahen. "The States and Cultures of the Lower Guiñean Coast." 399-433 in Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century. Edited by B. A. Ogot. Paris: UNESCO, 1992. 397. Bunce Island was discussed in the post for 10 January 2019.

6. Chambonneau was quoted in the post for 10 January 2019.

7. Lawrence Sanders Rowland, Alexander Moore, and George C. Rogers. The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina: 1514-1861. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. 178. See the map in the post for 10 January 2019 for these locations in South Carolina.

8. David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson. "Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas." The American Historical Review 112:1329-1358:Dec 2007. Table 1.

9. Henry Laurens. Letter to Wragg, 6 September 1755. Quoted by David Duncan Wallace. The Life of Henry Laurens. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915. 76.

10. Laurens, quoted by Wallace without citation. 76.

11. Walter Edgar. South Carolina. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. 146. Josephine Pinckney’s membership in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019.

12. Samuel Dubose. "Reminiscences of St. Stephen’s Parish, Craven County, and Notices of Her Old Homesteads." 35-85 in A Contribution to the History of the Huguenots of South Carolina. Edited by T. Gaillard Thomas. New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1887. 40. DuBose Heyward’s membership in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019.

13. Edgar. 153.
14. DuBose. 81.

15. Denise L. Doolan, Carlota Dobaño, and J. Kevin Baird. "Acquired Immunity to Malaria." Clinical Microbiology Reviews 22:13-36:2009.

16. Stuart J. Edelstein. The Sickled Cell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. On multiple inventions, 147-148, 150; on effects of sickle cell, 48.

17. William III’s attitude toward free trade was discussed in the post for 10 January 2019. Eltis’ team did stress the important of indigo as a commercial crop.

18. Barry. 110.
19. Hugh Thomas. The Slave Trade. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. 342.
20. Wallace. 15.
21. Wallace. On Lauren’s father’s death, 16; on Austin, 17-18.

22. Joseph A. Opala. "The Gullah: Rice, Slavery, and the Sierra Leone-American Connection." Website of The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. This was very similar to Thomas. 268.

23. Betty Wood. "Slavery in Colonial Georgia." Georgia Encyclopedia. 19 September 2002; last updated 24 September 2014.

24. Wood.
25. Wikipedia. "Seven Years’ War."

26. Barry. 87. In North America, the French and English armed their native allies. They not only attacked colonists, but each other.

South Carolina

Topic: Early Versions - Collectors
South Carolina began as a satellite of Barbados. Walter Edgar called it a colony of a colony. [1]

In 1660, Charles II assumed the throne in England and demand for sugar and tobacco soared. It wasn’t simply that the Restoration court was more decadent than the previous Puritan regime had been. Peace returned to England after twenty years of civil war.

Charles had spent much of the war in Europe where advisors to Louis XIV were promoting the mercantile idea a nation state should be self-sufficient with colonies that supplied its needs. France had established a trade station on the Sénégal river in 1659. [2] Soon after his return, Charles rewarded some followers with an English monopoly on West African trade. [3]

The Royal Adventurers in Africa established its headquarters on Bunce Island at the mouth of the Sierra Leone river, [4] where they hoped to obtain gold. [5] Boubacar Barry noted groups in the Southern Rivers region between the Gambia river and Futa Jallon grew rice. [6] Groups along the Sénégal river grew millet and sorghum. [7] Thus, the early English slave ships bought rice from native growers for the Atlantic voyage.

The English company was reorganized in 1663, with John Colleton included as an investor. He had developed a sugar plantation in Barbados during the Puritan Commonwealth, and was rewarded for his loyalty that same year with a share in the Carolina grant. By then, land on the island was so valuable, plantation owners were importing food from England and Ireland. [8]

Englishmen showed little interest in moving to the new colony. Wealth was produced by sugar, and other Caribbean islands were coming under English control. In 1669, the proprietors sent three ships to recruit colonists in England. [9] Among the men who arrived in 1670 was Thomas Heyward, of Eaton, Derby, [10] the immigrant ancestor of DuBose Heyward. [11]

Huguenots began arriving after Louis revoked the edict of Nantes in 1685. They included Isaac DuBose from Normandy [12] and René Ravenel from Brittany. [13] One was the progenitor of DuBose Heyward’s mother; the other was the immigrant ancestor of Beatrice Ravenel’s husbands. [14]

Once a population nucleus was established on the Carolina coast, more were willing to transfer from Barbados. John Yeamans settled near Port Royale where he imported cattle from Virginia in 1671. [15] By 1682, salted pork and beef were the colony’s primary exports to Barbados, Jamaica, and New England. [16]

Henry Woodward established trade with the Westo on the Savannah River in 1674. [17] Soon he and other traders were supplying deerskins to the Caribbean for the leather required for ancillary needs like harnesses, mill belts, and containers.

The increased demand for slaves by the French led to an African rebellion by the Muslim victims led by Nasr al-Din in 1673. An agent for the French company noted in 1676 one non-Muslim leader responded by

"taking captives, pillaging and burning the Toubenan region. He went so far as the very residence of Bourgali, devastating millet farms, cutting down seedlings. So complete was the destruction he caused that people were forced to eat boiled grass, carrion and bits of leather." [18]

This led to the ironic result that more slaves were available than food to feed them, either at the gathering points or on the voyages.

Ships needed rice, and popular legends attributed the introduction of the seed to ship captains coming from Madagascar. [19] In fact, the Carolina proprietors saw the potential demand early when one wrote the governor of Barbados in 1663 that they hoped to grow crops unavailable elsewhere in the English trading zone, including rice. [20] In 1672, the proprietors in London sent a barrel of rice to Charleston. [21]

Demand for rice increased after William III deposed James II in 1688. The Dutchman believed in free trade, and opened the slave trade to all companies that would pay fees to the crown. [22] Plantation owners in South Carolina began experimenting with rice. John Stewart reported it was grown in 22 locations in 1690, [23] when colonists ask the proprietors if they could pay their rents in commodities like rice. [24]

In 1700, the customs collector reported "they have now found the true way of raising and husking rice" and were shipping 300 tons to England and 30 to the Caribbean. The crop was so large it exceeded the availability of ships to transport it. [25]

The establishment of a commercial crop made South Carolina more attractive to immigrants. Josephine Pinckney’s primal ancestor left Bishop Auckland, Durham, in 1691 for Jamaica. Thomas Pinckney decided working as a privateer in whatever war England then was waging with France would be more profitable. [26]

When his ship docked in Charleston, the twenty-three-year-old asked to be allowed to settle. He invested his wages of war in real estate. Marty Matthews said he bought lots in town and a plantation on the Ashley river. [27] He also acquired rice land near Beaufort. [28]

Pinckney returned to Durham in 1694 after his parents died, perhaps to claim his share of the estate. While there he married Mary Cotesworth. He probably did not run the plantations himself. Matthews said he had found something more lucrative than growing rice. He bought a wharf and became a merchant. [29]

Graphics
U. S. Department of Interior. Wikimedia Commons. 27 July 2009. Uploaded by Bjoertvedt as "US map - rivers and lakes."

End Notes
1. Walter Edgar. South Carolina. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. 35.
2. Wikipedia. "Saint-Louis, Senegal."
3. Hugh Thomas. The Slave Trade. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. 198.
4. Thomas. 342. Bunce also was called Bence.
5. Wikipedia. "Royal African Company."

6. Boubacar Barry. La Sénégambie du xv^e au xux^e siècle. Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1988. Translated by Ayi Kwei Armah as Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 19.

7. Barry. 10.

8. Richard Dunn. Sugar and Slaves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000 paperback edition. 67.

9. Edgar. 41.
10. Barbara Thompson Epps. "daniel heyward." Gini website. 21 August 2015.

11. DuBose Heyward’s membership in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019.

12. "Isaac DuBose, I." Gini website. 23 May 2018.
13. French Wikipedia. "René Ravenel."

14. Beatrice Ravenel’ membership in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019.

15. Edgar. 133.
16. Edgar. 134.
17. Edgar. 135.

18. Barry. 109. His source was Charles Becker, who in turn was quoting P. Carson. Materials for West African History in French Archives. London: University of London, 1968. 352. The agent was Louis Moreau de Chambonneau

19. Nason McCormick analyzed motifs in the legends in "South Carolina - Rice’s Origin Tale" and "South Carolina - Variants on a Tale." McCormick’s website. 4 July 2010 and 11 July 2010.

20. A. S. Salley, Jr. The Introduction of Rice Culture into South Carolina. Columbia: Historical Commission of South Carolina. Bulletin 6. 1919. 3. The proprietor was George Monck, Duke of Albemarle.

21. Salley. 4.
22. Thomas. 204-205.

23. Judith A. Carney. Black Rice. Cambridge: Harvard University, 2001. 83. Her source was Peter Wood. Black Majority. New York: Knopf, 1974. 55.

24. Salley. 4.
25. Salley. 7. The collector was Edward Randolph.

26. Marty D. Matthews. Forgotten Founder: The Life and Times of Charles Pinckney. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. 1. It was the Nine Years War. Josephine Pinckney’s membership in the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals was mentioned in the post for 6 January 2019.

27. Matthews. 2.

28. John Pinckney. "The Pinckney Family Tree: Thomas Pinckney." John Pinckney website. 15 November 2005.

29. Matthews. 2.

Society for the Preservation of Spirituals - Come by Yuh

Topic: Early Versions - Collectors
The Society for the Preservation of Spirituals included "Come by Yuh" in its 1931 collection of songs from The Carolina Low Country. [1]

The Charleston group was organized in 1922 after a successful community sing sponsored by the Poetry Society. Membership was open to both Blacks and whites, but "limited to those plantation bred or plantation broken with good, but not professional, voices." [2] Barbara Bellows said it quickly became the "last bastion of planter aristocracy." [3]

DuBose Heyward was among the founding members. That summer he went to the MacDowell art colony in New Hampshire where he met his future wife, Dorothy Kuhns. [4] He published his first novel, Porgy, in 1925. [5] She converted it into a play in 1927. [6] When it was staged with an African-American cast in New York, the actors added their own "bits." [7]

Another society member, Bernice Ravenel, graduated from what became Radcliffe. While in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she wrote poems influenced by her friend, Amy Lowell. [8] In 1926, she published The Arrow of Lightning [9] after her first husband, Francis Gualdo Ravenel, died and before she married his second cousin, Samuel Prioleau Ravenel. [10]

Josephine Pinckney spent a semester at Radcliffe hoping to have the same kind of experiences as Ravenel. She joined the spiritual society after she returned from Cambridge in the summer of 1922. [11] Her own collection of poems, Sea-drinking Cities, appeared in 1927. [12]

Many, like Heyward, Ravenel, and Pinckney, had spent time in the north where they realized their native speech patterns not only were different, but also were culturally significant. Dick Reeves remembered he was mocked for reflexively using a Gullah [13] word when he arrived at a prep school in Front Royal, Virginia.

"They chided me about my accent and I wondered (tape malfunction) why it was that I talked so differently from the rest of the people. And when I got a chance I studied why Charlestonians speak differently. And it’s on account of our familiarity with the Gullah dialect and our Charleston brogue is influenced by the Gullah dialect." [14]

Gullah is a creole language dating back to slavery that developed when Africans from different communities were thrown together in holding areas in Africa, on ships transporting them to the United States, and in slave quarters. At each stage, they also needed to respond to whites who controlled their communities. Initially, only plantation owners and overseers needed to speak Gullah, but when African-American women were used as nannies, maids, and cooks, the language spread to all whites who had close contact with Blacks.

Society members could see the changes that came with World War I when rural African Americans began moving into cities where "standardized hymn sheets were becoming popular." [15] Pinckney’s cousin, Mary Elliott Hutson, thought the group should go beyond singing to collecting and preserving songs. [16]

Reeves told an interviewer in 1971:

"Many of us recalled the Negroes singing the spirituals. Sometimes we’d go in a member’s kitchen and the cook would sing to us, and at other times we’d go out in the country and learn the spirituals in the churches. And that’s how we learned them. Many individual members of the Society had remembered some of the spirituals sung in their locality by the Negroes on their plantation." [17]

Herbert Ravenel Sass suggested they publish the songs with essays to raise money "for the relief and medical care of the ‘old time negroes’." [18] This was personal to him and many others in Charleston. Rice production had not recovered after the Civil War, and the last crop was grown by Sass’s mother’s second cousin in 1927. [19]

Samuel Freedman said "members of Episcopal, Lutheran and Reform Jewish congregations [. . .] set about visiting Gullah churches in Charleston and the nearby Sea Islands." [20] Those who had grown up hearing and speaking the local Gullah language did the transcriptions. Heyward insisted they be "letter perfect." [21]

Members’ experiences had varied. Hutson may have been the only one who grew up on a working farm. Her father owned a cotton plantation near Beaufort, South Carolina. [22] Her parents retired to Charleston in 1916. [23]

Others, like Sass, only knew their family lands after they had reverted to second-growth woodland that was purchased by wealthy northerners for hunting preserves. E. F. Hutton bought the last rice plantation from Theodore Ravenel and merged it with four others. [24] Sass’ first books were The Way of the Wild [25] and Adventures in Green Places. [26] He was working for Charleston’s News and Courier when he joined the society. [27]

Pinckney’s family had owned five rice plantations on the Santee River before the Civil War. After the war her father negotiated with former slaves at El Dorado to work as share croppers. He gave up growing rice in 1886, a decade before Josephine was born. [28] One of her cousins continued living there until a chimney fire destroyed the house. The freedmen probably stayed near their family burial grounds. She inherited the land in 1915. [29]

When she was growing up, only one African American was constant in the house: the cook, Victoria Rutledge. Bellows said she’d been "born in 1875 probably in the freedman settlements along the Santee River." [30] Later, Lula Pencel Moore joined the household staff, and stayed with Pinckney until Pinckney’s death in 1957. The one sang spirituals, the other modern hymns. [31]

Heyward’s grandparents’ house north of Charleston was burned during the Civil War. After his grandfather died, his grandmother moved the family to Charleston, where Heyward’s mother was raised. His childhood was considerably less comfortable than Pinckney’s, especially after his father was killed in an accident at the rice mill where he was a wage laborer in 1888. [32]

The plantation was just a memory. What Gullah he heard came from his family and growing up in the city. His mother made money telling stories in Gullah, usually to northern visitors. [33]

End Notes
I pieced together the relationships between people and their ancestries from entries on sites like Geni and Find a Grave.

1. "Come by Yuh." The Carolina Low Country. Edited by the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1931. 308-309.

2. Barbara L. Bellows. A Talent for Living: Josephine Pinckney and the Charleston Literary Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. 69.

3. Bellows. 69.

4. Felicia Hardison Londré. "Heyward, Dorothy (Hartzell) Kuhns." In American Women Writers. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 2002.

5. DeBose Heyward. Porgy. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1925.

6. Dorothy Heyward and DuBose Heyward. Porgy: A Play in Four Acts. Garden City: Doubleday, Page and Company. The play became the basis for George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in 1935.

7. David Schiff. "The Man Who Breathed Life Into ‘Porgy and Bess’." The New York Times. 5 March 2000. His source was Dubose’s preface to the published play.

8. Wikipedia. "Beatrice Ravenel."
9. Bernice Ravenel. The Arrow of Lightning. New York: H. Vinal, 1926.
10. Wikipedia, Beatrice Ravenel.
11. Bellows. 68.
12. Josephine Pinckney. Sea-drinking Cities. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1927.

13. Gullah was a creole language that had developed in Carolina and Georgia. The fate of some African-American Gullah speakers was mentioned in the post for 5 October 2017.

14. Harold Stone Reeves. Interviewed by Joan Ball for the South Carolina Historical Society, 24 March 1971. Reeve wasn’t a writer but a story teller like Janie Screven DuBose Heyward. He recorded an album in 1963. Gullah, a Breath of the Carolina Low Country. Charleston: Lenwal Enterprises.

15. Bellows. 68.
16. Bellows. 69.
17. Reeves.
18. Bellows. 140.

19. Federal Writers Project. South Carolina: a Guide to the Palmetto State. Compiled by workers of the Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration in the State of South Carolina. New York: Bacon and Wieck, 1941. 289. The crop was harvested by Theodore Ravenel.

20. Samuel G. Freedman. "A Black Cultural Tradition and Its Unlikely Keepers." The New York Times. 17 June 2011.

21. Bellows. 69.

22. Anthony Harrigan. "My Family’s America: The Charleston Experience." Modern Age 282-289:1983. Her father was Marion Martin Hutson. Sass was Harrigan’s uncle.

23. Bellows. 69.

24. Charles F. Philips, Jr. "Colleton County Connections: Its People and the Events They Inspired." Colleton Genealogical Society website.

25. Herbert Ravenel Sass. The Way of the Wild. New York: Minton, Balch and Company, 1925.

26. Herbert Ravenel Sass. Adventures in Green Places. New York: Minton, Balch and Company, 1926.

27. James Hutchisson. "The Naturalist." Charleston 21:164-171:October 2007.
28. Wikipedia. "Thomas Pinckney (American Civil War)."

29. "Eldorado Plantation - McClellanville - Charleston County." South Carolina Plantations website.

30. Bellows. 25. Rutledge was her married name.
31. Bellows. 122-3.

32. Harlan Greene. "Charleston Childhood: The First Years of Dubose Heyward." The South Carolina Historical Magazine 83:154-167:1982.

33. "Mrs. Heyward To Present Reading." The Gaffney [South Carolina] Ledger. 29 January 1925. 1. Copy posted to Newspapers website by dubose1465 on 26 August 2015.

Four-Line Format - Come by Here

Topic: Early Versions
The four-line AAAB format of "Come by Here" used "come by here" as the refrain for the three statement-refrain lines, and as the last line of each stanza. Folklorists found versions along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, and in the contiguous areas of North Carolina and Florida. Unlike the six-line form, it was not commercially recorded in the 1920s.

The Society for the Preservation of Spirituals published nine verses in 1931. They combined an opening "somebody need you" with stanzas that cloaked death in metaphors of resurrection like "Gwine down tuh Jerdan" and "Soon een duh mawnin’." The unidentified singers repeated "Jedus duh call you" with "Yo’ fadduh duh call you." [1]

On the Georgia coast, H. Wylie knew eight verses in 1926. While his text was less explicitly about dying, it had two verses that referred to "the morning." [2] He used more incremental repetition: "somebody need you" was followed by "now I need you" and "sinners need you." He converted "come by here" into a separate verse. [3]

The version closest to "Kumbaya" was collected in Alliance, North Carolina, by Julian Parks Boyd in 1927. Unlike Wylie, who varied the pronouns he used with one verb, Minnie Lee used the pronoun "somebody" followed by adjectives or adjective phrases. The subjects were amplifications of the Charleston variant: "sick," "dying," and "in trouble." [4]

Ethel Best sang for John Lomax with a group of African-American women at the state prison farm in Raiford, Florida, in 1936. She grouped her AAAB quatrains into sets that began with "come by here" and ended with "well, it’s somebody needs you." The changing parts of her tripartite cantos included two known by Lee: "down in trouble" and "sick." The other was "somebody moanin’. [5]

While these performances varied in form from the ones with six lines discussed in the post for 25 November 2018, they all emphasized the word "need." These versions also were fairly specific that the need rose from sickness. The commercial artists used more generic terms for recordings intended for a wider audience that might listen to them at other times in their lives.

End Notes
These versions will be discussed in more detail in future posts.

1. Society for the Preservation of Spirituals. "Come by Yuh." The Carolina Low Country. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1931. 308-309.

2. The association of death with morning comes from Mary Magdalen and Mary’s visit to Christ’s tomb in the morning. The reference appears in Matthew 28:1, Luke 24:1, and John 20:1.

3. H. Wylie. "Somebody Needs You, Lord, Come by Here." Collected by Robert Winslow Gordon near Darien, Georgia, 1926. Archives of American Folk Song.

4. Minnie Lee. "O Lord, Won’t You Come by Here?" Collected by Julian Parks Boyd in Alliance, North Carolina, 1926. 658 in Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. Volume 3. Folk Songs from North Carolina. Edited by Henry M. Belden and Arthur Palmer Hudson. Durham: Duke University Press, 1952.

5. Ethel Best. "Come by Here." Collected by John Lomax at Raiford State Farm, Florida, 1936. Archives of American Folk Song.